Posts by Gomez Adams 139 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Aug 2006
No arguments against it? What about when driving happily along on with nothing in front of you and the sensor is triggered by a phantom fly or speck of dust and you get tail-ended by an HGV?
This happens regularly on our work vans - happily just the first bit and in this case all the seosor does is flash up a red warning light with a beep. I would *not* want it touching the brakes!
How the heck can someone drive an apparently identical car for 10/15 minutes without realising it was the wrong car?. As soon as I sit in my car after the garage has done some work on it I know this is not the car I left them with as the seat and steering wheel positions are not the same. It would be an extraordinary coincidence for the mechanic who worked on my car to be the same size and shape as me with the same driving position preferences.
Reminds me of an operator running some trainees through some basic commands on the console of our Sperry/Unisys mainframe. But of course not actually hitting Enter for those commands which could cause an issue. Finally he got round to showing them the command to reboot by keying in $! (Dollar-Bang), forgetting that this was the one command that did *not* need you to hit Enter for it to be actioned! :o
I would assert that "THESE INSTRUCTIONS" is ambiguous as it could refer to just the instructions before the the start of the questions.More instructions after the questions start could be quite rightly construed to be not part the "THESE INSTRUCTIONS" referred to.
So they have a delivery driver down at 71%. If they mean they can get the goods delivered 71% of the way then they are way under what should be currently possible. However the difficult bit that I don't see automation being able to handle in the foreseeable future is moving the goods that last 1% of the way over rough ground, between badly parked vehicles, through stiff lobby doors, up tight twisty stairs to the customer's door. Not happening.
As a delivery driver of many years experience 99% of the time the problem lies with the customer who fail to have adequately clear signage as to where they live. OK, if they live in a communal building then it may be down to the management company / housing trust / etc which have failed to sign which of several blocks is which or which is the entrance to particular flat numbers but in that case the residents should be complaining to them to get it sorted rather than moan about delivery drivers left wondering which mole hill is which.
BTW putting a house number on the side of the house or on an open gate neither of which is visible from the road is not a clever idea. Nor is allowing that bush in the garden to overgrow the house sign.
Finally, delivery instructions which say it is the house with the blue car on the drive is not much good if the car is not there or it is a dark evening on an unlit village road. Nor instructions which say it is the third house in the left but which do not say which direction that is coming from.
My own experience of something similar is much more mundane. Lent a USB charging cable to someone at an outdoor event who neglected to tell me they had dropped it in a puddle. Next thing I know the USB socket on my phone is borked! :(
Spent the next seven years using only wireless charging and Bluetooth or FTP file transfers until I eventually got a new phone last month.
Where I worked if we had exhaustively (and exhaustingly) eliminated all possible other reasons for a one-off, irreproducible glitch then we wrote it off as a "neutrino hit on the computer processor". In other words we had managed to do something that none of the well thought out and designed experiments that have been running for many, many years had managed to do in detecting one of the little blighters! :)
My TV does not nag me about anything. But then I just use it as a TV and choose which channels and which programmes I want to use. If I don't like what I see I choose something else.
So I am unclear as what the OP's problem is? Is it the TV itself doing this to him or is it one or more of the (not so) "smart" apps that are installed?
Look on the bright side: The smeary screen may be the result of being de-sanitised used a liquid cleaner which leaves a deposit as it dries.
These days I never use my fingertips on any public touch screen or keyboard but use a knuckle instead then use the de-sanitiser provided as I leave the store (use it on the way in to protect others from me and on the way out to protect me from others).
At least when I replaced my Charge HR with a Charge 2 they seem to have fixed the strap skin allergy problem and provided a much more robust connection for the charger. Not had any of the sync / battery problems mentioned here though I am up to date. Tend to sync via the USB dongle plugged into my Windows 8 laptop rather than my Android tablet though need to use the latter to edit self-defined activities.
One other rule that bar queuing needs to use: If I have wandered up to the bar for my third or fourth refill with my glass still half full to tide me over while waiting I am quite happy to give way to someone coming into the pub and are desperate for their first pint.
And what about bar flies who like to drink and chat at the bar rather than moving elsewhere after being served? Is the queuing system able to ignore them?
There was the story of a shift operator showing some newbies some basic op console commands for a Unisys mainframe where I worked. All harmless until he decided to show them the $! command which did *not* need you to then hit Enter to action it to reboot the computer (think CRL+ALT+DEL)!
Dollar, Bang by name and Dollar Bang by nature! :)
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2023
